


Rehearsal

by intothecest



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), F/M, No Smut, School Dances, Sibling Incest, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Valentine's Day, pinecest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 10:36:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17765186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intothecest/pseuds/intothecest
Summary: Valentine's Day is coming up, and Dipper wants to ask Mabel to spend the night with him... in a way that's just two siblings hanging out and having fun and totally not weird at all because they're just siblings and who would even think that?  Of course, to get just the right note he wants, he's going to have to rehearse his invitation a few dozen times.





	Rehearsal

Dipper paced back and forth the length of the hallway. When he got to Mabel’s room, every third or fourth rotation, he lifted his closed fist to her door… only to drop it again, and turn away. He didn’t have it yet. The words were there, mostly, but he didn’t trust them not to come tumbling out of his mouth in a disordered mess. 

He needed to practice a little more. For something this important, he couldn’t afford to screw it up. 

It wasn’t important at all, actually. In the grand scheme. It was just an attempt to put a smile back on his sister’s face… so it was extremely important, but telling himself it didn’t matter helped. So did practice, which he did in whispers… not even whispers, his mouth and tongue just moved along with the words and, if you had some sort of comic book super-hearing you might be able to pull some meaning out of the turbulence in the air. "Listen, Mabel, I was thinking… just because the guys at school are idiots, doesn’t mean we can’t have fun on Valentine’s,“ he murmured. "What do you say we skip the dance and have a twin-night, an Anti-Valentine’s Day. We’ll, I don’t know, watch monster movies or something." The "I don’t know” was carefully scripted to make it look like the idea was spur of the moment and not practiced as much as it was. “I even got you some chocolate…" He squinted intensely and bit back a swear word. "I even got US some chocolates to pig out on,” he corrected, loud enough that he could hear it, but nobody else. 

Sure, it was in a heart-shaped box. And yeah, they were Mabel’s favorites, the ones with the cherries inside that Mabel would suck out like a vampire after breaking them open, and then eat the rest of the outer chocolate after. But that’s just because that’s all they were selling. As long as he didn’t buy the chocolates for her alone, there was nothing weird about that… why did he suddenly screw that up? He’d gotten it right in previous run-throughs. Was he entering the realm of over-practicing? He was prone to that, that and over-thinking. A little practice was good, but when Dipper did it too much, he started to screw up even more, get different versions of the same rehearsed speech mixed up, then lose his place, and everything falls apart. _I should just go for it,_ he told himself. _Of course, if I just made a mistake, that’s the worst time to just go for it, isn’t it? After all, I might make it again. Shouldn’t I iron out the problem, and THEN just go for it? Or would I just screw something else up?_

“Oh, man, now I’m over-thinking about over-practicing!” he muttered. “Maybe I should just do this over text.”

No, one more run-through. “Listen, Mabel, I was thinking… just because the guys at school are idiots, doesn’t mean we can’t have fun on Valentine’s. Why don’t we skip the dance and have an old-fashioned epic twin-night, an Anti-Valentine’s Day. We’ll, I don’t know, watch monster movies or something." He started to bring up the chocolate, and then thought of a better idea. Don’t even mention them. If you cut that line entirely, you can’t screw it up. All you have to do is **show** the chocolates, later. Just say something else. "We can even barricade the doors and windows and pretend everybody else in the world’s been eaten by zombies and it’s just the two of us." Ooh, that was inspired… he hadn’t thought of that line before. Mabel always loved pretend games. And if it was just the two of them… who knew what might happen, right? No, no… Dipper knew it was stupid to think like that. This was just the two twins having a fun night together. "What do you say?”

There was one more thing he could add, and he stopped to consider it one last time. “Come on Mabel, will you be my anti-Valentine?" It was the line he was most unsure about. First, because he wasn’t sure ‘anti-Valentine’ wasn’t something bad, like, somebody you hate. And even if it wasn’t, it sounded so cheesy. But it could work as _BROTHER-cheesy_. Brother-cheesy was okay, wasn’t it? Especially because Mabel might laugh at brother-cheese, or at least smile, and that was the whole point of this, wasn’t it?

 _One more run-through,_ he told himself again. And did it, including the zombie line, and the anti-Valentine. He had to do this while it was still fresh in his mind. Before he ruined it again with more over-practice.

He went back to Mabel’s door, and this time his knuckles made contact with the wood, rapping their secret knock. "Yeah,” he heard from inside. For Mabel, that was permission to enter, so he opened the door.

She was laying on her bed, on her stomach, her legs in the air facing him, face completely hidden, all he could see was the back of her hair, and her arms were in front of her face. A classic mope pose, except the legs were… _damnit, Dipper, don’t try to look up her skirt, you pervert. What is wrong with you?_ The legs were bouncing a little with nervous energy, probably anxiety. She was still worried, he decided.

He took a deep breath, forced his eyes onto her hair, and launched into his speech. “Listen, Mabel,” he began. “I was thinking…”

She rolled over on her side as she turned towards her, beaming. In her hands was her phone, fingers flying over the screen, texting. “He asked me!” she squealed, and then broke into a grin so wide he could see her braces.

“… What?”

“Alex! He just asked me to the Valentine’s dance!" She held her phone by both hands and shook her hands furiously in excitement. 

"Alex?” His heart shrivelled a bit. 

“He said he wasn’t sure he was going to go, but now he is and he wants to take me!”

“That’s… that’s great, Mabel.” He smiled. And it was a genuine smile, because… she was smiling. And it was hard to not smile when she was so happy. Even if it felt like he was bleeding somewhere internally. 

“I mean, it was kind of last minute, the dance being tomorrow, but… I guess I can forgive him.” 

“Yeah, but you know…” and he stopped himself. Because he knew Alex, and he realized he could tell Mabel that the reason he waited so long was because he was going to ask Lucy first, and she must have turned him down, and so Mabel was the second choice. He could exaggerate and point out that she was maybe even a third or fourth choice after a few other girls turned him down. Maybe it would make her think twice about going with him. But he couldn’t do that. She was smiling, even if he didn’t put it there, he couldn’t be the one who took it away. It would have been cruel… and it’s not like Alex was being a jerk or anything. It was just a dance, not a marriage… so what if he had his eye on somebody else first? She may not have been his first choice, but he wouldn’t have asked her at all if he didn’t see something he liked in her, the same things Dipper saw. At the dance they could get to know each other, and he’d see just _how_ awesome Mabel really was. Dipper suddenly thought he was going to be sick, but finished lamely, “You know how guys are… always putting things off.”

“Speaking of,” Mabel said, her voice rising an octave. “What about _you?_ Are you going to get off your butt and ask somebody? I heard you pacing out there. You’re _practicing,_ aren’t you?" 

"I…” He shook his head. “I thought I was going to. But she already found somebody.”

That took the smile off her face, but it wasn’t sadness, it was sympathy. “Oh, Dipper…” she said. “You waited too long, didn’t you?”

“Nah,” he said, trying to brush it off, look unbothered. “I was overreaching anyway. She wouldn’t have wanted to spend Valentine’s with me.”

She didn’t answer that directly. “You can come with Alex and me?” she suggested. “Just because you don’t have a date, doesn’t mean you can’t come to the dance. There’ll be single girls there, you can show them the Dipper Dance Magic.”

Dipper smiled weakly. He was happy for Mabel, but he needed to get out of there so he could punch a pillow or something. He couldn’t punch the person who really deserved it, himself, for getting his hopes up. "Nah. I think I’m just going to sit this dance out at home. Watch monster movies or something. Valentine’s Day always kind of sucks anyway.“ How could it not, when you can’t ask out the person you want to?

Her eyes were wide, staring at him, like she saw right through him. "You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m not really a dance person anyway." He turned and walked slowly away. 

By the time he was aware of the footsteps behind him, Mabel had already enveloped him in a hug, from behind, her chin resting on his shoulder. "One of these days, I just know, you’ll find the girl that’s perfect for you.”

“Thanks, Mabel,” he said, closing his eyes and enjoying the closeness. The problem was, he already had. She finally let go after maybe ten, fifteen seconds, and he looked back to her and forced himself to smile. “You have fun tomorrow, okay?" She nodded, and he walked off. This time, she let him, and retreated to her own room, back to the texting conversation she’d been having.

Once he got into his room, Dipper punched the pillow a few times, then lay on his bed staring at the ceiling and started practicing a new speech. "Listen, Alex,” he said quietly. “I heard you’re taking my sister to the dance. And I’m happy for you guys, but just remember, you do anything to hurt her, and I will murder you and mount your head on the school flagpole as a warning to others." 

That felt good, picturing that. Probably too harsh, though. He’d have to work on it. 

**The End**

**Author's Note:**

> The story continues in [Showtime](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17780519).


End file.
